SIIPI EMPII

On a lovely flower I land to catch my breath. I rest my wings and enjoy a few drops of nutritional gruel.

I'm observing the nature fooling around with cryptic coloration, the effects of color and light. A bird's coloring is made up of singular plumes and feathers... like a mosaic. I'm contemplating the masquerade of a hunter dressed up in camouflage and screaming bright orange. Once I saw a seagull and thought it was an angel. Once I zoomed infinitely into a single pixel and felt a path open, leading to the source of an unnamed nutriment. The sun has inspired tons of art, like the tanning bed for example. It is all nature! Bless the whole world!

I flew over a wall separating the city and the woods. On it some naked witches were rehearsing their balance beam routines. I flew over a monastery and saw people gathering to form amplifiers for prayer. I flew over a lawn marking the spot where there's no need to grow food. On the silk road I saw a truck carrying the cotton fabrics printed for Jan Anderzén.

I'm on a true meadow. I'm aware that love gives you wings and that any flap of my wings may cause a tornado in some faraway land. Shattered bridges flying through the air, flocks of cars swiped into the ocean. My wings are closed, rubbing against each other in a circular motion – producing some small blithe rattle pitched too high for the human ear to catch.

KEVÄTJUHLA

In the 1973 BBC documentary The Ascent of Man Jacob Bronowski marvels at humanity. He sees pole vaulting as a crystallization of various human idiosyncrasies: an exact grip no ape can quite match, the utilizing of a tool, the will to battle gravity and to rise higher than her or his peers. What sets off the pole vaulter is not fear but exaltation. In a sporting event people gather together to see who's the best at breaking away from the pull of the earth.

2.

The Great Maze Book by Greg Bright was published the same year. The ecstatic introduction text convinces the reader that a maze can be something more than merely a fun game.

“My mazes are patterns, and, as such, they relate to other patterns, from fast flowing water to the stars in the sky. But this emphasis on the visual aspects is misleading. ... My real concern with the making of mazes involves no interest with the overall visual result whatsoever. ... The thrill of being lost, the strangeness of routing (the mazes) — these are the sort of things that originally attracted me to mazes.”

3.

There is a concept in Dianetics called Contagion of Aberration. It refers to a phenomenon where a group of people stimulate each other to do things that are insane.

4.

Two shapes side by side and another one beneath them – there are faces everywhere. Google tells us about a technology they have developed: "While a computer won’t react like you do when you see a photo, a computer can be trained to recognise certain patterns of colour and shapes. For example, a computer might be trained to recognise the common patterns of shapes and colours that make up a digital image of a face." Google doesn't tell us if the computer will recognise a face of an angel.

5.

"He played with an intensity and a force and a sureness that was physical, palpable. When he started to get into it, he made me stand up out of my chair and back up. – – I realised I was at the back of the room when my spine bumped into the back wall. I went into the men's room because I couldn't handle the intensity. I was leaning my head against the cool vomit-green tile and drawing deep breaths, trying to calm down, when the door went wham! and in walks John Coltrane, still playing at top intensity and volume, totally into it. He blew me out so bad I slid down the wall. The guy was still playing his solo."

(David Crosby: Long Time Gone)

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As part of the exhibition three listening events took place, hosted by experts of exciting sound:

Sunday 26th of April Kobran Kädet (Tampere)Saturday 2nd of May Mental Alaska (Helsinki)Saturday 9th of May Himera (Turku)

HOME SWEET HOME

Home Sweet Home Dividing indoor air from outdoor air is truly a space age product. Buildings, our second shell of clothing, have in recent decades become space suit like. As we have lost touch with earth's climate, we've turned our focus on controlling the air inside our buildings.

We currently spend over 90% of our time indoors. We breathe machine fltered, artifcial air, thinking it's clean and that we are safe and sound in our isolation. But we are marinating amidst our toxic materials, in the muck of our own metabolism. And when we get ill, we blame the microbes.

We are at war with the microbes, armed with the latest chemicals, indifferent to the fact that our campaigns are destroying all the favorable ones at the same time, making room for the strains to which we are defenseless against. The more we insulate and disinfect, the more allergic we become. Our bodies simply don't know how to handle the toxins that our actions are creating. Sick in our mold ridden houses, we still have faith in air conditioning and detergents.

Microbiology has produced immense amounts of information on how individual microbe strains differ from one another, and how to live with them, but we choose to reject that information or apply it in all the wrong ways. We are perplexed when someone states the natural fact that a walk in the woods at mushroom season brings us in contact with more spores than a moldy house. We are blind to quality, seeing only quantity. We may well be facing a time when we wear protective bags over our heads for a walk in the woods, as not to breathe in the spores. On return to the city we are sadly suffocated by the indoor air of our own homes.

I found an abandoned doll house at the old factory building where my studio is. The thing became a storage space for random junk and a stage for spontaneous miniature sculptures and installations. It became a squat turned into a small gallery.

The Small Gallery is a collaboration with architect Lars Mattila. We invited seven artists to produce miniature art works in reaction to Mattila’s text about buildings and air.

We’re living in a space age reality where the air outside and the air inside have been separated. The buildings we live in have turned into spacesuits. While we are getting more and more out of touch with what’s going on with the planet earth we focus our control efforts on the interiors of our shelters.

The Small Gallery is the first part of a larger work called Home Sweet Home which was shown at Titanik Gallery in Turku right after the Sorbus exhibition in November 2014.

Jan Anderzén and his partners celebrate the transcendental power of ecstatic music. Alas Rattoisaa Virtaa is the first Kemialliset Ystävät album in four years. It is the result of chance enhancing online collaboration methods, desire to get lost in the sound archives and the high art of meticulous editing. The album title is from visions of rivers running down from Heart of Darkness to the City of Joyful Noise. If contemporary music is a high speed train passing by then KY's music would be an orgy of light under a railway bridge.

A band member Lars Mattila experiences the music of Alas Rattoisaa Virtaa in spatial terms:

"There are worlds accessed only through our auditory system. I hear a Wunderkammer of freestanding sound objects. Rhythms like sequences of seemingly random stuff laid out on the forest floor: a pair of thrones, a Henry Moore sculpture, a watermelon, two thrones, a Moore sculpture, a melon... I trust the path to go on even if I can't see behind the hill. There's motion, wether it be drunk driving or super human rapid eye movement. The sheer amount of detail makes it impossible to take everything in at once. One's perception and shifting focus reshape the experience on each listen. I remember my visit to Cappella Palatina in Palermo where Normann architecture, Arabic arches and Byzantine dome form a harmonious whole. Various cultural and spiritual influences are recognized as equals. The sense of space also brings to mind the end scene of The Lawnmower Man when the dude is trying to escape the virtual world."

RATTOISA VIRTA

The Joyous Current is not chasing the lightness of a feather but that of a bird. The process of tuning the gallery space aims for precise expression, but failure and chance are more than accepted – they shall make the work grow stronger like babies.

The cosmic warriors of the Joyous Current are fighting for the diversity and the endless movement. They feed on the vibrations of our faith and excrete music. Listen to the beast on the quilt and you will wake up with dirt under your fingernails. The sounds oozing out from the music box are debates with the wind. The groove of the work mirrors qualities found in some radical music, the floral reality and African masquerades.

We are all scribes for the universal ghost, recording what she/he dictates – some listen more carefully and some got bananas in their ears. The destiny of a truth is to morph from an absurdity into a worn out dictum with the ecstatic truth making an exception. The ancient Greek sculptures used to be covered in bright colors.

NUOTTEJA

Jan Anderzén is a Finnish artist whose visual practice is a kaleidoscopic ghosting of his celebrated sonic wanderlust in Kemialliset Ystävät and Tomutonttu.

His collagist, painterly work is heavily populated with furry geometries and carnivalesque planes that stick out with playful grace into alien fields of ebullient, mycological action, trippy galactic splatter, and dripped up creaturedom.

‘Nuotteja’ is a graphic score that crawls around the walls, consisting of a series of mandalas painted on shitty 7"s, various paper notation works, and a suspended, musical stave that forms the basis of an accumulative composition of vibrant debris: Yuletide refuse, incandescent trash and fresh produce.

Anderzén’s visit has been made possible by Altmusic, through their national touring of Tomutonttu.

- Shannon / HSP Gallery

NUOTTEJA

photo by Sami Sänpäkkilä

exhibition view

I PICK NOTES FROM THE SKY

2010

PARTITURES

exhibition view

exhibition view

MANDALAT MAAILMALLA

exhibition view

ULLAKKOPALO LP

Jan Anderzén is one of the few Finnish musicians to achieve renown on the international experimental circuit. In the case of Anderzén (who also plies a trade as a visual artist), this is not a matter of juxtaposition between the experimental and the mainstream, or a calculated career choice. Using music and images, he is busy creating a world that is a law unto itself, a world of exceptional freedom and beauty.

KY albums have been peppered with contributions from individuals such as Islaja, the members of Avarus, and Sami Sänpäkkilä. It’s not easy to tell who plays what on Kemialliset Ystävät recordings. Rather than being a project consisting of solo parts, the band is an eco-system within Anderzén’s reality.

One of the essential techniques applied by Anderzén is collage, in sound as well as image. He is no conventional instrumental virtuoso; his music is created with a fluctuating array of instruments and equipment. The focus is less on instrumental prowess and more on the overall sound and impression, as well as the tension between the various materials. As a manipulator of these elements, Anderzén is in a league of his own. His sampler based solo performances as Tomutonttu have left no doubt about that.

A close listening of Anderzén’s music reveals its near architectonic precision. He is known for an exceptionally painstaking approach to creating his music. All this hard work is readily evident in the finished product, not as an over-emphasised complexity but as a clearly independent fully realised vision.

Kemialliset Ystävät is like a natural phenomenon. It is difficult to imagine anyone having consciously constructed it, such is the ease with which it presents itself to us. To be in the presence of Anderzen’s work is captivating in the same way it is to stare into the fire – simple, yet inexplicable. It truly takes a master to create such an experience, but listening to the new Kemialliset Ystävät album evokes just that: a feeling of lightness.“